Thursday, February 5, 2009

My friends of Seminarios Athena are presenting, next week, "Touch of Class: How we teach introductory programming". The talk will be hosted by Bertrand Meyer, Eiffel's language creator.This is the presentation's overview:

Teaching programming faces a host of challenges, due in particular tothe unprecedented variety of student backgrounds and to the demands ofthe IT industry. Techniques that worked well in the seventies do notscale up to today's context. The "concepts or skills?" debate is morerelevant than ever, especially in the ever more globalized world ofsoftware development.

For the past 6 years, we have taught introductoryprogramming at ETH, based on an "outside-in" approach that makes itpossible to introduce the reality of large software while emphasizingthe principles of sound software development. This approach has resultedin a forthcoming textbook ("Touch of Class: An Introduction to ProgrammingWellWith Objects and Contracts", Springer-Verlag, May 2009).I will present the result of our experience, including metrics that we havesystematicallycollected along the way, and draw conclusions regarding how to teachprogramming today. I will argue the task consists ofteaching twenty-six seminal concepts, and will explore one of them in depth.

Presentation will be at UTN medrano 951 on next wednesday 19hs (UTC-2)

Saturday, January 3, 2009

These guys presented this last week ( past year though ) at the CCC congress, their work about algorithmic music . As a result, they came up with custom hardware capable to implement the idea of rhythms ( and polyrhythms ) generated by algorithms ( like Euclidean algorithm to compute gcd, as stated this paper, also mentioned in the congress ).

Since I've lost all my midi libraries and python wrappers in my old G4 powermac, Im trying to rebuild all over again ( which is a pain in the arse btw ). I'll be updating this post, when I get something working.